


Vices and Virtues

by DestielDestiny



Series: The Students of Regent High [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Car Accidents, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Teen Romance, Teenage Drama, Underage Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-16
Updated: 2016-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-14 06:16:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5732443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielDestiny/pseuds/DestielDestiny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max Gilligan liked the colour blue, cheesy romance novels, and the way smoke would billow from the edge of a cigarette in the wind. She liked vanilla ice cream, but only with chocolate fudge on top. She liked people that smiled, but she herself did not. She liked pizza, and books, and English class.<br/>But most of all, she liked Ryan Gothe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vices and Virtues

**Author's Note:**

> Part of a series of one-shots, but can be standalone. It's unbeta'd, so if you catch anything please tell me so I can fix it. Thanks and enjoy.

Max Gilligan liked the colour blue, cheesy romance novels, and the way smoke would billow from the edge of a cigarette in the wind. She liked vanilla ice cream, but only with chocolate fudge on top. She liked people that smiled, but she herself did not. She liked pizza, and books, and English class.  
But most of all, she liked me.  
I’d known she’d liked me for a long time because even though she thought she was a subtle as a superspy, she was not. She was blunt and obvious and turned red when I looked at her. I never said anything. I didn’t want her to do anything she didn’t want to. I didn’t want her to not talk to me.  
I liked it when she talked to me. I liked the way she smiled and the way she’d get all nervous if she thought she said something wrong. I liked her bad puns and cringe worthy attempts at humour. I even liked the way she got all bossy when she found out I didn’t do my homework.  
And lo and behold, one day I found that I was the one staring at her, and I was the one aching for her to talk to me, and I was the one who had finally gone head over heels for Max Gilligan.  
She had her face buried in one of the Harry Potter books, her feet pulled rather uncomfortably looking to her chest between the desk and the chair, in the back of the room. Our Spanish teacher was droning, as he usually did, but she wasn’t paying any attention. Max was biting her lip, gazing intently on the pages of her favorite book. I watched her turn the pages and the excitement build on her face and—  
“Ryan Gothe, do you pay no attention while I’m speaking?” the Spanish teacher had apparently been watching me for nearly as long as I’d been watching Max. He looked rather unhappy.  
“No, sir,” I replied, “I pay attention.”  
“Then what was I talking about?”  
I sucked in as much air as I could, and glanced behind him on the board. There were several forms of verb conjugation there, so I figured it was a solid guess. “Verbs.”  
Mr. Sanchez squinted his eyes at me, and then returned to teaching. Max had surfaced enough to hear me get in trouble, and was snickering uncontrollably.  
“I’d say that was an eleven out of ten, bucko,” Max mumbled, sarcasm dripping from her words.  
It was right then, I think, that I realized exactly how much I felt for Max. Before then, it had just been the appreciation of the faces she made, or how willing she was to make friends with me after shunning nearly everybody else. Right then, it became about the way her bright blue eyes would flick up and down my face when she thought I wasn’t looking, the way she threw her head back when she laughed, how when she bit her lip like that it made me want to kiss her.  
It was then, I think, that I realized I was in love with Max Gilligan. Completely, and totally in love. I had gone to a place where I don’t think even she had been. No, it was a river that ran deep.  
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to dismiss the thought. I couldn’t love Max. I hadn’t loved anybody in my life. Not my freshmen year girlfriend, not my best friend, not my cousin. I had only heard what it was like, but that was from entirely unreliable resources like my druggie friend Dom.  
But that felt exactly like everyone had described. I had fallen in love with Max in a way that would always endure, even after I left for college, long after I’d moved on, probably until the day I die. It was a wild fire that could not be quelled, something that burned me through so completely that I was scarred for life.  
Yes, Max was fire, and I wanted to be burned. 

It was about three days after that when I accidentally caught her smoking. I mean, I’d heard her laugh, her voice talking over someone else, but I hadn’t really intended to follow it, I just did.  
I found her with one of the other girls from the Spanish class, Allison. Allison wasn’t smoking, but Max had the cigarette to her lips in a way that made me forget I was one hundred percent against smoking. She took it out of her mouth with her left hand, throwing her right arm around Allison and grinned at whatever her friend had said.  
I was left with a decision to make. If I let her know I knew, then she might not talk to me anymore, but if I didn’t tell her I knew, she’d keep doing it, and I had no desire to lose her to lung cancer.  
At which point, I demanded that my brain knock it off. I didn’t care if I lost this random, blonde, smart, funny sixteen year old girl to lung cancer. She’d made her choices, she’d deal with the consequences. It wasn’t my problem.  
She took my choice away when she glanced in my direction, not seeing me at first, and then looking shocked and upset.  
“Ryan?” She exclaimed, sounding somewhat defeated.  
And then I, of course, said one of the worst things I could have said. “Why the hell are you smoking?”  
She opened and shut her mouth a few times before whispering something to Allison, who left almost immediately.  
“It’s a good distraction, and don’t act like you’re perfect,” she said, her lip trembling. I was so used to seeing her nearly explode with pent up energy that seeing her look so broken stunned me.  
“I never said I was perfect,” I replied, stepping closer, closing the gap.  
“I bet you don’t realize it,” she said, dropping her gaze to the pavement and taking her glasses off with her free hand, “but I smell it when you come to class drunk. You’re not very good at getting the smell of alcohol out of your clothes.”  
“Not as you are at getting smoke out.”  
She laughed, an almost bitter sound to how she normally did. “I wear clothes I leave in my locker when I smoke. My mother would have my head if I came home smelling like cigarettes.”  
“My mother couldn’t care less.” I replied. A silence settled over us, but it seemed normal, comfortable even. I knew she didn’t know how to respond, most people wouldn’t.  
She fixed her eyes on my face, watched out of her periphery the way I stuffed my hands in my pockets, tracked my motion as I leaned resolutely against the wall.  
“You really shouldn’t do it, you know,” she said, breaking the quiet.  
“What? Drink?” I said.  
Max nodded slowly.  
“Fuck. I know that. I know how bad it is for you, but it’s a—a,” I reached for the right word, “what did you say? A distraction? It’s definitely a way to distract myself.”  
“Doesn’t mean it’s good for you.”  
“Is smoking good for you?”  
“Well, no, but—“  
“Then you shouldn’t smoke, either.”  
“I’ve tried to stop before, I just—It’s hard, you know? I didn’t really have a motivation for it.”  
“I know.”  
“So, what are we going to do about this?” she asked, waiting, watching, for me to answer.  
“We could quit together. This could be us, quitting our vices.”  
Us.  
I liked the idea of there being an “us”. If there was an “us”, then maybe it would be easier to transition from Ryan and Max to one piece, like how puzzle pieces become a picture.  
It was only after she threw her arms around my neck and wrapped her legs around my waist and I kissed her liked she deserved to be kissed that I realized there couldn’t be an “us.”  
I realized that an “us” would be too destructive to go any further than right there, in that moment. We would never make it together. We’d be toxic.  
I think Max realized it, too, because she clung to me tighter, willing everything not to end, not just yet.  
“You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to do that.” She whispered, her fingers tangling themselves in the longer hair at the base of my spine.  
“I think I do,” I whispered back, cinching my arms tighter around her waist. I wanted to keep her there for as long as I could, savor the moment to the point that I’d never need another second where there was an “us.”  
“I like you a lot, Ryan.”  
It was all I needed to hear to give in entirely and forget about every destructive outcome. It didn’t matter that I was going to college at the end of the year, or that she was a smoker and I was an alcoholic and we were just going to be one ugly mess that would leave her friends to pick up the pieces.  
“I know.”

It was only after several weeks of this strange “there, but not there” relationship that I finally found myself beside her in the lunch line.  
Sure, I’d hung out with her a few times after school when both our schedules were free, and I saw her in class all the time, but it wasn’t enough, and it didn’t give much opportunity to talk when all her friends were with her.  
“You should sit with me today,” I told her, placing my hands on her hips to get her attention.  
Max looked startled, as expected, but then grinned and nodded when she realized it was me.  
Once we were released from the tight crowd of high schoolers desperate for their cardboard pizza, I led her to the spot in the cafeteria where I usually wolfed down lunch. Nobody else usually sat with me, but Dom had made a few appearances every so often.  
Max picked at her pizza beside me, lifting off the pepperoni first and eating slowly before starting in on the rest. About halfway through the slice, she stopped and glared at me. “What are you staring at?”  
“Nothing. Carry on,” I replied, smirking.  
“No, you’re staring at me. What am I doing?” She placed the pizza meticulously on the plate and crossed her arms over her chest. “Did I do something amusing?”  
“You’re always amusing.”  
The tips of her ears started to turn red. “Shut up.”  
“Really, though. You’re adorable, babe.” I cringed the second the words left my mouth. We hadn’t talked about any sort of relationship yet, let alone one where I could call her babe.  
“Babe, huh?” She asked, but she sounded more like she was testing the word rather than actually offended.  
“I’m sorry,” I said.  
“If I’m babe, what does that make you?”  
“Well, you used to call me blondie, and I kinda liked that, but it’s not a big deal. In fact, you’re not even babe.” I hesitated, then added, “Unless you want to be.”  
“I am partial to Max, but if I’m babe, it means you stopped thinking.”  
“What?”  
“You aren’t debating whether or not we’re a couple or anything, which qualifies as thinking. Trust me, I’ve been overthinking this far too often.”  
“So, uh, what does that mean?”  
“It means that I can do things like this,” I felt her hand against my knee beneath the table, “without you yelling at me.”  
“So does that mean I can do this?” I placed my hand behind her head, tilting it slightly to face me.  
“Well, I mean, only if I can do this,” she ran her hand further up the leg of my jeans.  
“So, final offer, I can do this,” I kissed her quickly. It was, of course, only the second time I’d ever done it, but this time it was without the taste of smoke lingering in my mouth, without the after effects of whiskey during break. I was sure she’d smoked recently, but it couldn’t have been all too recent.  
She just smiled and pulled me back by my collar, deepening the kiss by the way she held my head still. In comparison to the first kiss, it tasted entirely like undiluted Max. Or at least, undiluted by cigarettes Max. Her lips still tasted a little like greasy cafeteria pizza, but I didn’t care all that much.  
She broke into a wide grin, and rested her forehead against mine. We stayed that way until Dom slammed his lunch box on the table across from me, exclaiming, “Hell, you two are so sweet I may not even need to eat any candy. ‘Sup, Max?”  
Which, of course, shocked me as much as the fact that he sat there in the first place. Since when did he know Max?  
I tried to think of a time that I told Dom about Max, but there just wasn’t one. Unless they were in a class together, which was unlikely, they shouldn’t know each other. Maybe they met in the hallways?  
I kept trying to rationalize why they would know each other, but my mind kept returning to Dom’s favorite afterschool activity: goofing off at one of the drug hubs in the area.  
“You two know each other?” I asked after a while.  
Max shook her head quickly, too quickly, and Dom rolled his eyes. “Of course Max and I know each other, we—“  
“We don’t know each other. I’ve never met you,” Max replied harshly.  
“Y—“  
“I don’t know you.” She said, and that seemed to settle the matter. Dom stopped trying to get his word in and she relaxed.  
No matter how insistent she was, no matter how much I trusted her, I still had the feeling she was lying, but I couldn’t figure out why. If she didn’t have anything to hide, why would she lie?  
Hell, who was I kidding? Of course she was hiding something.

Fast forward to May, and we’d developed some sort of insane, haphazard, codependence on each other. And, even though I promised her and told her every day that I was done drinking permanently, there were still a few times that I found myself downing one of Dom’s “get drunk fast” mixtures from a chocolate milk bottle in the cafeteria. I wanted her to be enough. I wanted it more than anything, but it just wasn’t realistic. She wasn’t quite enough to make me forget everything that was happening, and it wasn’t her fault. I knew she wouldn’t understand that it wasn’t her fault.  
Also looming over me was the deadline for my response to the two colleges I’d applied to. Both had accepted me, as one was state and the other—well, I think my acceptance to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was a shock to everyone. University of Oregon seemed to be a given.  
The problem wasn’t that they were bad schools, the problem was that they both had their perks.  
You’re probably sitting there asking yourself “But, Ryan, how can U of O be even worth considering if you got into the Art Institute? That’s been your dream since you were a kid!”  
Well, if I stay at U of O, I’m close enough to come back to Portland on the weekends. Close enough that I could continue to be with Max on a regular basis.  
If I skip off to the Art Institute, I won’t be able to visit as often, and god knows what that will mean for us.  
It took her sitting down beside me on the grass of the park, staring intensely into my eyes, and straight up asking about what college I was going to before I actually talked to Max about it.  
“Well, you know…” I rubbed my arm roughly. “The response is due soon, and I just…”  
“Are you going to keep avoiding the question?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.  
“I just… I just need to hear you say it. If I hear you say it, then I’ll know.”  
“Say what?”  
“I need to hear you actually say you love me. I mean, not if it’s not true of course, but I won’t know until you say it.”  
She laughed. Max threw her head back, her arm around my shoulder, and she laughed. “Of course I love you, stupid. I wouldn’t have put up with you if I didn’t.”  
“Really?”  
“Really.” She twirled a piece of my hair around her finger. “Now where are you going?”  
“I was thinking U of O. It’s more practical.”  
“Yeah?”  
I nodded.  
“I like it. It means I can come south and torment you whenever I want.”  
“Unless you have school.”  
“We had school today.” She reminded me.  
“But we didn’t skip, we just came afterwards.”  
“Exactly,” Max said, “but I could come after school and hang out.”  
“Sounds like a plan.”  
“So, does that mean you’re into this?”  
“What do you mean?”  
Where she had been leaning into me, there was a sudden gap, a coolness where her body had been.  
“I mean,” Max said, racking her hands through her blonde hair in the nervous, panicky way that she did, “I mean I’m asking if you’re serious?”  
“About college?”  
“About—about this.” She cast a vague gesture between them that died out quickly. “About us.”  
I frowned. Of course I was serious about “us”.  
And then my thoughts from that first day, that first kiss, returned, hitting me harder than a semi truck. There really shouldn’t have been an “us” for me to be serious about, and as much as I really wanted there to be, I knew, somewhere in a spot I would repress into oblivion, that there wouldn’t be an “us” for much longer.  
“Fuck, Max.”  
I’ve come to find that there are three types of “fuck” that slip involuntarily from my lips. The first comes when I’m angry, when I’ve had enough, when I’m yelling. It comes in the heat of passion, when I can’t find words to describe my thoughts. The second appears when I’m happy, smiling, often followed by an elatedly shouted, “Yeah!” This kind was always the one that made Max laugh and shake her head, like I was a misbehaving puppy.  
The third—well, the third kind of “fuck” comes when there’s nothing left to say, or when there’s too much left to say, but it’s not the right time to say it. It comes when I’m done, when I’m defeated, when I know what I’m doing is wrong. It comes when I’m forcing myself to not say what needs ti be said. But most of all, it’s said when it’s the last seconds, the clock is ticking, and I’ve given in to the darker part of myself.  
She smiled bitterly. “I should have known. Ryan Gothe doesn’t love anybody, even his own mother. Why the hell would he love me, the bitch from Spanish class?”  
Max pushed herself off the ground, staring down at me like I was two inches tall, which ironically was exactly how big I felt. I felt helpless in a situation I had control over, a driver sitting in the passenger seat.  
“Couldn’t you have told me this before you got my hopes up? I actually thought,” she took a shuddery breath, “I actually thought that you loved me. God, I’m delusional. Honestly? That’s almost as bad as thinking you’d actually give up drinking for me, or sleeping around. It’s just not you.”  
I couldn’t make my mouth move to defend myself. I was sitting there, letting her talk, waves crashing into rocks on the beach.  
“Couldn’t you have reminded me that everything between then and now was so insanely out of character that it couldn’t have possibly been real?”  
I stood, realizing then that I was, in fact, taller than she was, something I had never realized before. Her eyes flicked up to my face, and I noticed something else. Those eyes, her eyes, were not the same eyes that they had been. These eyes were filled with anger and hatred and malice. They were a deeper, hostile blue. The spirals of green, undertones of grey; it was all gone now. The innocence, the love of the smiles was gone entirely. I was standing in front of someone entirely different than who I’d stood in front of in November, and this was most definitely not the same Max as the one I’d sat next to in December, who’d stopped smoking and taken up smiling for herself. This was May Max, a cold Max, a broken Max.  
A Max who’d been drinking.  
In all honesty, I should have recognized the bitter smell when she sat down beside me, her breath hot against my skin, but every piece of me denied it. My Max wouldn’t drink. My Max knew what alcohol did to people. My Max was long gone.  
“Don’t—don’t fall in love with people like me, Max,” I said finally. “You’ll get strung along until you’re blue in the face and then you’ll suffocate.”  
And then she left. It was like she was never really there. She left no empty space behind her, no echoing last words. I almost could have believed that she hadn’t been there and I’d made it all up in my head, but then I saw her ring laying on the ground, the Claddagh she’d worn for as long as I could remember. I held it in my hand, examining the cool metal at my fingertips, then slipped it in my pocket. 

Suddenly, she stopped glancing at me before nodding at Allison when the Spanish teacher told us to partner up. She stopped reading in class, she stopped taking not-so-subtle looks at me when she thought I wasn’t looking. Max had returned to the loving arms of her asylum-worthy friends during lunch.  
It was like I had never existed. 

It was June. Graduation. Max wasn’t there like she’d promised she would be in May. Dom was there, though, but he wasn’t graduating with us. He’d tanked all of his classes and was required to retake senior year. There was one r two others that would be doing it along side him, but the lack of Dom was more noticeable to me.  
Although I hated Dom and everything he stood for—the drugs, the reckless sex, the using people—he was still my best friend. I would still have some twisted sort of hole in my life where he used to stand.  
He clapped me on the back, a fading smile on his face. “This is it, buddy. This is the end.”  
“I actually made it to art school, man.” I said. After Max and I stopped—it wasn’t really a break up or a pause so much as we just discontinued, stopped—I decided that U of O would just be a temptation on my part. Chicago was further away, easier to make up excuses for. Easier to convince myself to stay.  
He nodded. “You sure did.”  
“Take care of Max for me, okay?”  
“She was good for you.”  
“Keep her that way.”  
“’Course I will,” Dom grinned and pulled his jacket around him tighter. “We’ll be toasting to you tonight, if you wanna come by a party a few of us are throwing.”  
“I don’t drink anymore, you know that.”  
Dom winked. “Sure you don’t.” and he slipped away as quickly as he’d come. 

I pressed the cigarette to my lips, inhaling deeper than I should have, flicking the lighter on and off with my free hand. The smoke ghosted up into the cold, Chicago winter air. I’d found a spot that was not so windy on campus, but it was still frigid, snow still covered most of the ground and fell steadily from the air.  
“Hey, blondie,” Paitlyn said, rounding the corner. As she settled next to me, huddled in her warm winter coat, I almost asked her not to call me that. It’s not that it bothered me that my girlfriend had a pet name for me, but it bothered me that it was the same thing Max had called me for so long. It was sacred to her, to me, but not to Paitlyn.  
“Hey,” I replied, exhaling a mouthful of smoke.  
“You know that’s an awful habit,” she said, but she grinned, so I knew she wasn’t all too serious about trying to get me to quit. Which, I guess, was good because there was no way in hell I was going to. This was one of the last pieces of Max I could cling to, the only other being the Claddagh I wore around my neck on a leather string.  
“I know.”  
“So, are you going to come inside anytime soon? You’ve been out here for a while.” Then, as an afterthought, Paitlyn added, “The cafeteria is serving hot chocolate. You know, the way you like it with both marshmallows and whipped cream.”  
“I think I’ll stay out here a while.”  
“Are you okay, Ryan?” She still didn’t look all that concerned, which, to be honest, concerned me. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe I wanted her to not care about me to make me feel better about not caring about her. Maybe I needed to feel better about picking the one stupid, airheaded girl on campus, who didn’t seem as airheaded as I thought, just because she was nothing like Max.  
“I, uh—no, I’m really not.”  
“What’s up?”  
I felt like Paitlyn might make a good friend, maybe even a best friend, but she made an outright terrible girlfriend, and had been getting progressively worse since late September when we went on our first date. This was the first time she’d acted like she cared about anyone other than herself.  
“So, did I ever tell you about my senior year? I mean, I’ve heard a lot about yours, but…”  
“No, I don’t think you did.”  
I ran my hand through my hair after stowing my lighter back in my pocket. “There was a lot going on. The most significant thing would have to be my, uh, ex-ish girlfriend-ish person. Her name was Max.”  
“Now that’s a name I’ve heard before,” Paitlyn said, nodding. “Dom brought her up last time he visited.”  
“Yeah? Well, it’s just, this was kind of the day we first really got together, and I’m just not with it.”  
“It’s okay. I can stay with you, if you want, or I’ll just leave you alone.”  
“You can go back inside.”  
“I don't know if I want to leave you alone like this.”  
“It’s okay, really, Pait. Just go back inside and warm up. I’ll come inside soon.”  
As she was leaving, she turned back, pressed her fingers to her lips and said, “I love you.”  
I only nodded. 

It was after midnight that night when the buzzing of my cell phone startled me awake. I sat up, squinted at my clock, and grabbed blindly for my glasses, then picked up the phone.  
“Hey buddy,” a very suspicious sounding Dom said.  
“Why the fuck are you calling me so late?” I asked, rubbing my eyes beneath my glasses, adjusting slowly to the darkness.  
“Well, uh, it’s, uh, well, uh, Max.”  
“What about Max?”  
“Well, she as, uh, driving, and, uh, she wasn’t, uh, with it and, uh, she hit a, uh, tree, and uh. So, we’re in the hospital right now. Or, the, uh, ER.”  
“Repeat everything you just said in a calmer manner, please,” I instructed.  
“Max was in a car crash, Ryan. She’s in the ER. I don’t know if she’ll make it.”  
Max. Car crash.  
Max, my Max, was dying in a hospital over two thousand miles away from me.  
“Dom,” I said calmly, “why are you telling me this?”  
“Well, two reasons, actually. First being that I thought you deserved to know, being hopelessly in love with her and all. Second, she’s been really not herself lately, and I thought that if anybody could fix it, it’d be you. She needs you back, man.”  
“How would you know?”  
“I’ve been spending time with her. It shouldn’t matter to you. You moved on. But she still needs you, just as a friend. If she makes it out of this alive, then she’d going to need you more than she did before. They told me she’s got at least a week left, and if she makes it through that she’ll be in the clear.”  
I nodded, but then remembered that I was in Chicago on the phone, not standing beside him watching over her like I should have been. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”  
So I hung up on Dom, called Paitlyn and explained the situation. She was more than understanding, in her second out of character moment that day, and offered to drive with me, seeing as it was nearly a one and a half day drive without stopping. I agreed to it because it was the fastest way, and we set out for Portland. 

“You’re actually here. In the flesh, standing in front of me in Portland!” Dom exclaimed upon seeing me.  
“Is she any better?” I asked immediately.  
He shook his head, “But she’s not any worse, either. Just keep your head on its socket, that’s a good thing.”  
Dom gave Paitlyn a quick hug before she went to find the lobby.  
“So, um, I actually have something to tell you,” Dom said after a while.  
I knew what was coming. I saw it coming all the way from Chicago. Why else would Dom care about Max at all?  
“What’s that?”  
“We’ve been sleeping together.”  
“I don’t care, as long as you didn’t start doing it before I left.”  
Dom breathed a sigh of relief, a small smile appearing on his face before his eyes fell once again on Max. “She looks so small like that. I don’t understand how someone like that can look like this.”  
I shrugged. I didn’t know. I still don’t know. Looking at Max in that bed only reminded me of how small I had felt, how small she could make me feel. But then, I remembered how she could build me up, make me feel like I was on top of the world. She was so in the moment that it made me dizzy, all of the extensive planning she put into the rest of her life was left in the dust. She was a wildfire, she was a tornado, a hurricane, an earthquake, my personal destruction, and yet I kept coming back for more. I couldn’t stop the addiction. And there I was, once again, hoping for another dose of my drug of choice.  
“Fuck.” I muttered.  
“What?”  
“I think I love her.”  
“You think? Man, everybody around you has known since day one except the two of you. This entire fight was ridiculous.”  
“I just couldn’t stop her.”  
“She’s pretty stubborn.”  
I nodded. “Yeah, she is.”  
“If you still want her back when she wakes up, I’ll back off. You can have her.” Dom offered.  
“She’s not property, for one, but if she wants you, then I’m not going to force her.”  
“I know.”  
I settled back into a chair and shut my eyes for the first sleep I’d had in thirty two hours. 

I was standing by her bedside. Dom had gone back to his apartment to change his clothes and shower, leaving me alone with her. Or rather, Paitlyn and me alone with her.  
My eyes ran the length of Max’s body. I noted that her face hadn’t changed at all, but her knuckles were scraped and cut. It looked fresh, yet almost peaceful the way they were spread on the sheet.  
“You love her, don’t you?”  
I looked up, startled to hear another voice after Dom left. “What?”  
One of her nurses stepped into the room with a knowing smile on her face. “I’ve been in this business for a while, hon, I know what love looks like. I’ve had to tell enough broken souls their boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse died. I’d say you look a lot like distressed husband, but based on her age I’d go with boyfriend.” Then her face contorted as she thought about it some more. “But that can’t be right either. The boy who brought her in called himself her boyfriend.”  
“I’m her ex.”  
The nurse messed with a few of the IV drip pieces. “Aha. How come?”  
“Mostly my own stupidity,” I admitted.  
“Seems to be a pretty common factor, but you don’t seem all that stupid.”  
“I said some things that were misinterpreted and just never really fixed it.”  
“Oh.” Recognition played across her face. “I know who you are! You’re the one that boy—Dom, wasn’t it?—was talking about. You drove down with your girlfriend.”  
I felt my face heat up. “That would be me.”  
“I bet it means a lot to her.”  
“I hope it does.”  
“If it makes you feel any better, she was asking for a Ryan while she was barely conscious.” The nurse winked, then left. Somehow, that really did make me feel better. I felt better until I was once again joined by another person, this time Paitlyn.  
“So this is Max,” she said softly. I nodded, not trusting myself to use actual words.  
“She’s pretty,” Paitlyn comments, “almost looks like me.” She ran the edge of the blanket between her fingertips, then looked at me with sad, almost pleading, eyes. “Goddamnit, Gothe. You really didn’t change between high school and college.”  
She let out a hysterical laugh, and it was then that I could really see the resemblance. The blue of her eyes, the way her blonde hair seemed almost white in the bright, sterile light of the hospital room.  
“Hey Pait?” I said. I took a deep, raspy breath, and I knew then that even Paitlyn knew what was coming.  
“Look, Ryan, I know I’m not her, no matter how hard I tried to be. I failed at becoming the girl you wanted most. I’ve known for a long time you didn’t love me. Looking at you now, I guess I know where your happiness comes from, how you could be so unhappy at the art school of your dreams. It wouldn’t have mattered where you had her. I don’t think I need to tell you this, but I can see it in your eyes that you love her. Hell, I knew when Dom was talking about her, the way your eyes got all glazed over and shiny? So, I’m going to save my dignity before you can cheat on me with her and say that we’re over. No more dating, no more kissing. I don’t think I could stand telling you I love you knowing that you’re just waiting to come home to her. I’m sorry.”  
“Thank you, and I mean it. There’s no way I could ever thank you enough. And I do love you, just not the way you want me to.”  
“Means a lot, coming from you.” Paitlyn smiled, tears welling up in her full-of-life blue eyes.  
I brushed my fingers against Max’s face, unmoving, cold. It didn’t seem like her anymore.  
“I don’t want her to die, Paitlyn.”  
“I know.” She pressed her hand against the small of my back and leaned her head against my shoulder. “I know.”

She didn’t wake up the next day, or the day after that. She didn’t wake up for nearly a week and a half, but the doctors were all painfully optimistic. They always smiled and told us how hopeful they were and that she wasn’t getting worse. It wasn’t until one of the nurses was standing over her and started freaking out, then running to get a doctor, that I lost my shit.  
“What’s going on?” I demanded as she fled. When the nurse didn’t answer, I dropped to my knees beside Max and pressed my head against her arm. “Christ, Max. Don’t you dare die.”  
“Mntded,” she mumbled, a pulse of movement flying through her arm. She moved slightly, placing her hand in my hair. “So pssmstic.”  
“Max,” I said. “Fuck, Max.”  
“M’here. M’here.” Her fingers gripped at my hair, entangling themselves the way they had before.  
“Oh my god,” I said breathily, “I didn’t think you were going to—“  
“Back up, Ryan,” the nurse called, stampeding into the room followed by what seemed to be the majority of that floor’s staff.  
“She’s awake!” I told them, as though they didn’t already know.  
“We need to ensure she’s stable.” The nurse explained, nearly ripping me from Max and bootkicking me out of the room.  
“My boyfrnd was ‘n here,” Max muttered, and then what was left of my heart shattered to pieces. 

 

I went to a hotel that night, but didn’t remember to tell Paitlyn where I was going. I figured she’d call if she needed me. Finding myself sleepless and heartbroken, I tried watching late night television, but that only succeeded in making me regret checking into a hotel. After a few hours of painful TV shows followed by even more painful TV shows, I decided to take a shower.  
As the hot water beat down on my head, I couldn’t get the image of Max, before I had screwed up her life, out of my head.  
The way she bit her lip when she looked my way, the way she managed to bring her knees up behind the desk even though she was over six foot, the way she’d grin and display her shiny braces every time she got an answer right. The way she’d show off when she aced a big test, or how stressed out she always was about finals. The way she mocked me when I didn’t do the homework, or how she always let people copy hers, even if she didn’t have to. The way she wore plaid, not the way Paitlyn wore it around her waist, but how she wore it like an actual shirt, sometimes over a skintight tank top. The way she would lean into me, but convinced herself that I wouldn’t notice.  
“Fuck,” I hissed.  
I stepped out from under the water, not bothering to dry off before pulling my dirty jeans and a Tshirt back on. Staring into the mirror, which had unfogged when I cracked the bathroom door, all I could see was Max now, not in a hospital bed, but with Dom, indulging in Dom’s life. May Max, drinking. June Max, probably on oxycodone half the time. And then my mind shifted, and I saw me, relatively happy. But I wasn’t, I wasn’t happy at all. Then Max was there again, beaten, bloody, bruised like she had been at the hospital.  
And then I couldn’t help it.  
I slammed my fist into the mirror, shattering it to pieces. 

“You’ve gotta come back, man,” Dom pleaded.  
“I can’t,” I replied honestly. “If I come back, I won’t be able to leave. Besides, it’s pretty clear she picks you.”  
“It’s not a matter of picking one of us, it’s who makes her the better person. I can think of ten reasons on the spot that you should be with her over me, Ryan. Half of those have to do with the fact that you’re a) not high all the time and b) not allowing her to get high. You’ve got to come say goodbye, at least.”  
“I can’t do it, okay? Why can’t we just leave it at that? She’s alive, I have school I need to get back to, and I’ve got a fucking portfolio due at the end of the week.”  
“Will you at least let me put her on the phone?”  
“Can she talk straight?”  
“Yeah.”  
“Then sure.”  
There was a crackle, a rustle, then her voice, weak and tired. “Hey, Ryan.”  
“Max.” After six months of not hearing her voice, it was like angels come down from heaven.  
“I hear you’re in Portland.”  
“Yup.”  
“And you didn’t say hi?”  
I glanced over at the shattered mirror still spread across the bathroom floor. “I was too busy breaking mirrors, doll. Y’know how it is. They can’t handle all this.”  
“Sure, that’s why the mirrors broke.” I heard her laugh softly. “But I really wanted to see you. Maybe you can drop in next time you’re here.”  
“I—I don’t think I’m coming back, Max.”  
“Like soon? Because I can wait until summer. It’s not a big deal. It’s not like I’m that impatient.”  
“I mean ever. I’m not coming back. I can’t.”  
“Why not?” Her voice trembled slightly, and I felt a wave of guilt in the depths of my stomach.  
“It’s really hard, coming back.”  
“But what about me, Ryan? I’m still here.” There was a slight hesitation before she said, “You left me behind.”  
“You—you’re the reason it’s hard.”  
“And why is that?”  
“Fuck, Max. There’s so many reasons.”  
“Give me one.”  
“You’re with Dom. You moved on, but I don’t think I can. The further away from you I am, the easier it’ll be to forget about you.”  
“I though you—“  
“I couldn’t do it anymore.” I said with a sigh. “That and my girlfriend broke up with me.”  
“So, you’re not over me?”  
“Guess not.”  
She laughed, and it sounded so much like she used to that I almost started to scream. “Really?”  
“Really.”  
“I’m not over you either. I bet Dom would kill me if I told him that’s why I’ve been doing stupid shit lately. The more out of it I am, the easier to forget that he’s not you. As much as I want him to be, he’s not.”  
“Hey, Max?”  
“What?”  
“I love you. I loved you in May, I loved you in June, I loved you when I got to school in September, I love you now. I love you here, I love you in Chicago. I love you always and everywhere.”  
“I know.”  
“Guess I just needed to get that out there.”  
She sniffled. “I love you always and everywhere, too, Ryan.”


End file.
